"MADAME,--Your conduct astonishes as much as it afflicts me. Not content with rending my heart by your disdain, you have the indelicacy to keep my tooth-brush, which my means do not allow me to replace, my estates being mortgaged beyond their value. Farewell, too lovely and too ungrateful friend! May we meet again in a better world!" Balzac's account is obviously tinged with literary exaggeration, though the stories of La Palférine were no doubt gleaned among the gossips of the boulevard. He shall be balanced by an adverse witness, one M. Challamel, who, after a severe attack of _le mal romantique_ which caused him to run away from his father's shop, settled down to be a staid librarian. In his "Souvenirs d'un Hugolâtre" he says: "In the wake of the freelances of the pen the _Bohemians_ abounded, affecting the profoundest disdain for all that the bourgeois call 'rules of conduct,' posing as successors to François Villon, playing the part of literary art-students, frequenters of _cabarets_, often of disreputable houses, breaking with the usages of polite society, and believing, in fine, that everything is permitted to people of intelligence.... By the side of these sham romantic Byrons there existed some good fellows who fell into the excess of the literary revolution, and who paraded the active immorality of debauch. Sceptics, materialists, loaded with debt, they raised poverty to a system and laughed at their voluntary insolvency. Some shook off early their Diogenes' cloak ... others succumbed prematurely ... all had imitators who ended by forming numerous groups and by founding a school. The spirit of Bohemia became infectious, and engendered the spirit of mockery (_la blague_)." I conclude this general testimony with some lines from Alfred de Musset's "Dupont et Durand," which is an imaginary conversation between two old school-fellows, one of whom has become a prosperous citizen, the other has failed as a Bohemian. The Bohemian says: _J'ai flâné dans les rues,_ _J'ai marché devant moi, bayant aux grues;_ _Mal nourri, peu vêtu, couchant dans un grenier,_ _Dont je déménageais dès qu'il fallait payer;_ _De taudis en taudis colportant ma misère,_ _Ruminant de Fourier le rêve humanitaire,_ _Empruntant çà et là le plus que je pouvais,_ _Dépensant un écu sitôt que je l'avais,_ _Délayant de grands mots en phrases insipides,_ _Sans chemise et sans bas, et les poches si vides,_ _Qu'il n'est que mon esprit au monde d'aussi creux,_ _Tel je vécus, râpé, sycophante, envieux._